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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23391766">Last Man Standing</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadlyRobots/pseuds/DeadlyRobots'>DeadlyRobots</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Red Dwarf (UK TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Accidental Death, Canonical Character Death, Episode: s01e01 The End, Gen, Minor Character Death, Personal Growth, Season/Series 01, Wakes &amp; Funerals</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-03-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-03-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-01 16:01:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,654</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23391766</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/DeadlyRobots/pseuds/DeadlyRobots</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The hardest moment in George McIntyre’s life had not, in fact, been his death. Nor was it the moment he was left standing in the Drive Room as the entire crew was killed by a radioactive explosion. No, the worst moment was a single word, uttered at his Welcome Back reception: "Speech!"</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>17</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Last Man Standing</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Flight Coordinator George McIntyre was not what you would call an impressive man.</p><p>He was small in every conceivable interpretation of the word - short, lythe, with ratty features and a nervous disposition. He was the quietest officer who worked in the drive room. By the time anybody had noticed he’d clocked in to his shift, he’d usually already been there long enough to have already taken his ten-minute break, and as often as not was already planning on what he was going to have for lunch.</p><p>(It was always a ham, lettuce and mayonnaise sandwich. It always came with a pickle spear on the side. He always left the pickle spear on the plate because he’d always hated pickles, and he was always too nervous to consider asking the food dispenser not to bother giving one.)</p><p>He was, however, <em> Red Dwarf </em>’s Flight Coordinator. It was a technically impressive job that was not easy to explain. When asked what he actually did as Flight Coordinator, he’d chuckle and say “I coordinate the flight.” Or rather, that’s what he imagined would happen if he had the courage. People rarely engaged with McIntyre. The only time anyone has asked a question aimed in his direction, it was actually a colleague asking a technician how long that broom had been left there.</p><p>The hardest moment in McIntyre’s life had not, in fact, been his death.</p><p>Dying, it turned out, was easy. You picked it up shockingly quick.</p><p>Of course, McIntyre didn’t <em> remember </em>dying. Holograms never did. They remembered up to their last backup at the Hologram Projection Unit, and his had been two weeks ago.</p><p>He’d <em> seen </em> it, though. It was common practice for Medical to offer to show the deceased the footage of their cause of death, and McIntyre hadn’t quite been able to muster up the courage to say “Of <em> course </em> I don’t want to see how I died, you obscene piece of putrid mule excrement. Who wants to see that? You might as well offer to show me a montage of every time I’m shit my pants. And actually, the death would be at the end of that anyway.”</p><p>So he’d seen it. He’d seen the footage of himself walking in the direction of the officer’s mess to order lunch, and musing to himself that today would be the day he’d ask the food dispenser - Dispenser 1742B, affectionately nicknamed Boris by the crew due to it being the only food dispenser aboard the ship to have a thick Russian accent despite offering almost no Russian cuisine - to hold the pickle.</p><p>Even before the aneurism, he wouldn’t have made that request.</p><p>Something popped in McIntyre’s head, making a sound like a wet balloon bursting against a brick wall. He’d been dead before he’d hit the ground.</p><p><em> Well, </em> he’d thought, <em> At least it was painless. I hope. </em></p><p>Watching the footage of his death hadn’t been the worst moment of McIntyre’s life, either.</p><p>Being resurrected as a hologram - a simulation of his living self composed entirely of light, but unable to touch - had been strange, but not <em> difficult </em> . Certainly nobody aboard <em> Red Dwarf </em> would’ve <em> chosen </em> McIntyre for hologramatic resurrection.</p><p>But the role of Flight Coordination, the act of coordinating the flight, was deemed mission-critical. <em> Red Dwarf </em> couldn’t make its lengthy journey back and forth across the solar system without one.</p><p>Protocol, then, made the decision. McIntyre was brought back as a hologram. His body had been cremated and would be shot out into the stars. His mind, however, was expected to be back at his post the following morning.</p><p>This was unfair for a number of reasons, one of which was how anybody expected him to actually interface with the flight computer when he could not, in fact, touch any damned thing.</p><p>The one that principally concerned McIntyre, however, was his own shelf life.</p><p>With the ship about eighteen months away from Earth, he knew his time remaining was, to put it simply, brief. He’d be kept operational until they made it home, at which point they’d find someone else to fill his post, and he’d be switched off.</p><p>It was standard operating procedure. It was, after all, difficult to find a replacement while actively out in space. That’s why the hologram systems existed in the first place. But he knew he was a year-and-a-half’s journey and a Craigslist posting away from retirement. This time, permanently.</p><p>The moment he realized all of this was also not the worst in his life. In fact, it’d brought him a fair amount of peace.</p><p>Nor was it when he stepped into the crew mess hall to see dozens of people sitting, waiting for him. His Welcome Back reception.</p><p>The Captain said some kind words. Toddhunter had everyone stand for the cake-cutting. There was a nice little toast.</p><p><em> Smeg, </em> he thought. <em> I hope they don’t expect a speech. </em></p><p>Then it happened. The worst moment in McIntyre’s entire experience, living or dead.</p><p>“Speech!”</p><p>McIntyre recognized the voice - one of the vending machine repair guys he’d seen tinker with Boris’ innards once or twice. Dave something.</p><p>That was it. That was the worst moment of his life. Being expected to give an impromptu speech in a roomful of people he didn’t recognize and, he believed, probably didn’t actually know he’d died in the first place.</p><p>What occurred next was not, to McIntyre’s recollection, a thing that had happened. In fact he’d have to watch the video playback later to learn what he’d actually said. He’d made a couple of solid jokes. He’d pointed at a complete stranger, called him Joe, and implied he’d slept with his wife.</p><p>All in all, not a bad little speech.</p><p>He’d actually done quite well.</p><p>He wasn’t sure why he’d been so nervous.</p><p>In fact now he was thinking about it, he wasn’t sure why he’d <em> ever </em> been nervous.</p><p>In the days that followed, McIntyre walked to and from his post in the Drive Room with a newfound confidence. He’d heard about this way back in basic training- it was apparently not unheard of for people, particularly people of an anxious or nervous disposition, to lose that sense of dread upon revival as a hologram. There were many theories, ranging from an imperfect simulation to an incomplete scan of the psyche, but the one he’d come to choose as his personal favorite was that without the fear of death, most people… simply mellowed out.</p><p>He’d been dynamite giving that speech. Alright, yes, he couldn’t remember it, and he certainly looked quite pale on the vid, but he’d <em> killed </em> . And at what was basically his own wake, too! How many people get to do <em> that? </em></p><p>His crewmates had noticed the change, and almost overnight he’d become the life and soul of the Drive Room. McIntyre hadn’t realized how solitary his job had been before, but now people were stopping by, chatting, making jokes. And he was chatting back! He was making people laugh! Some of his colleagues had started including them in their playful ribbing of each other, and he’d displayed an aptitude for giving as good as he’d got.</p><p>In death, McIntyre found something he didn’t know he could ever have - life.</p><p>A life that would be snuffed out in a year and a half as soon as <em> Red Dwarf </em> returned to Earth.</p><p>Ah. There it was again. Fear. Panic. Anxiety.</p><p>Maybe he’d get lucky. Maybe they wouldn’t be able to find a replacement. Maybe there’d be a huge shortage of Flight Coordinators on Earth when they got back. Maybe <em> Red Dwarf </em> would be diverted elsewhere, or something would happen to pause or extend their travel home entirely.</p><p> </p><p>~*~</p><p> </p><p>McIntyre hadn’t been asleep when the alarm went off. Not really. Holograms don’t actually need to sleep. But they do <em> simulate </em> sleep, and they certainly dream. He’d heard rumors of a large display down in the Hologramatic Projection Unit that could be configured to display the ship’s hologram’s dreams and subconscious thoughts. When he’d heard that, he’d felt a terrible pit in his stomach rise up like heartburn.</p><p>His current dream was identical to the one he’d had the night before. He was having a nightmare about being turned off.</p><p>
  <em> He sees the Captain step toward a big red button with a skull emblazoned on the front, and without hesitation, press it. In that moment, McIntyre drops, falling through an endless void of black, looking up at the trap door as the Captain waved goodbye, getting smaller and smaller before disappearing over whatever the vertical equivalent of a horizon was. </em>
</p><p>
  <em> This time, as he falls, he begins to hear alarms. </em>
</p><p>McIntyre awoke suddenly, immediately standing upright. He didn’t actually have any say in the matter - in the event of a shipwide alert, the hologram is automatically taken out of sleep mode to man their station. McIntyre was already fully dressed in his uniform, and as soon as he realized this he stepped out into the hallway.</p><p>Holly’s voice boomed down the ship’s decks, proclaiming an emergency, and ordering Arnold J. Rimmer to report… somewhere, he couldn’t make it out over the noise.</p><p>It was at that moment, as McIntyre was wondering why one of the vending machine repair staff was being asked to report to a critical location aboard ship, that he found himself standing in a nuclear explosion.</p><p>Holograms don’t have many senses. They can see and hear, of course. They can, in some situations, smell, which one would assume means that they’d also be able to taste if they had a real mouth, or at least a solid one, smell and taste being essentially the same sense in different places. They don’t particularly feel the cold, but can feel heat in certain circumstances.</p><p>Standing in the midst of a nuclear explosion was, it turned out, not one of the circumstances in which holograms were aware of the temperature, though McIntyre found it interesting that nuclear explosions smelled rather a lot like marshmallows and cinnamon.</p><p>Then he vanished.</p><p>Briefly.</p><p>McIntyre reappeared in the Drive Room a moment later.</p><p>“Apologies,” said Holly. “You’re being projected internally for the time being Looks like your Light Bee got fried in the explosion. We’ve got spares somewhere...”</p><p>“Hang about, explosion? Holly, what happened?” McIntyre stepped toward the leftmost terminal on the display, which was not the closest display and certainly not the only one in the Drive Room currently displaying Holly’s round, slightly balding face, but was the one in his eyeline.</p><p>“There’s been an accident, George.”</p><p>“I can <em> see </em> that, the whole bloody <em> ship </em> can see that!”</p><p>“No they can’t,” Holly deadpanned, which is simultaneously the most <em> and </em> least appropriate delivery in the circumstances.</p><p>“Why not?”</p><p>“Everybody’s dead, George.”</p><p>It didn’t take McIntyre long to work out what had happened. “The Drive Plate must’ve been faulty, or given a shoddy repair job, at any rate. Whole ship’s been blasted with cadmium 2, I’m guessing?”</p><p>“Yep,” Holly nodded. “Gordon Bennett, you figured that out quick.”</p><p>“Then the whole ship is radioactive. Lethally so, I reckon.”</p><p>“Correct. I’ve already taken the necessary precautions, George. I’ve plotted a course out of the solar system, heading for deep space. By the time the JMC realizes we’ve missed our shipment we’ll already have an 18-month head start. They won’t be able to work out where we are, and they certainly won’t be able to catch up with us. We can continue on course until the radiation dies down to a safe background level.”</p><p>“That’ll take millions of years.”</p><p>“So it will, yeah.”</p><p>“Right.” McIntyre thought about this for a moment. “So… what, we spend the next few mil together? Just us? Alone?”</p><p>“Well, not technically speaking, no.”</p><p>McIntyre’s eyes went wide. Of course! David Lister. The Liverpudlian fella who’d yelled out during his Welcome Back reception. The Captain’d had put him in stasis for smuggling a cat on board. They’d never found the cat - they wouldn’t now, poor thing - but Lister was in suspended animation. He would still be alive.</p><p>But.</p><p>“You can’t let him out until the radiation dies down to a safe background level,” said McIntyre.</p><p>“Well yeah, I know <em> that </em>,” said Holly.</p><p>McIntyre considered his prospects. There weren’t any. The ideal scenario, and this was an exceptionally loose definition of the word “ideal”, was that he’d get to spend the next few million years alone with Holly as his only company. Then, after that, the statis booth would open, and he’d be stuck on board the ship with the git who’d been responsible for the worst moment of his life.</p><p>Well, he wasn’t looking forward to that. He wouldn’t even be able to throttle the man to death. He didn’t actually have any hands.</p><p>Eternity with a disaffected AI, and then another eternity with the worst person he knew.</p><p>Wait. No. Hang on.</p><p>McIntyre looked at his reflection - or rather, the reflection of his simulated face - in the window. He looked out to the depths of space. By the time Lister awoke from stasis, he’d be a very, very long away from home.</p><p>He’d have no one.</p><p>McIntyre looked back to the monitor, sighed, and said, “Holly, I need you to do me a favor.”</p><p>“Well, you’re the senior officer now, George. Anything you ask isn’t so much a favor as it is an order.”</p><p>“Do me a favor,” McIntyre repeated, “and keep Lister sane. Divert all power available to maintaining that stasis booth, don’t take your eye off of it. A few million years is a long time, God knows if your systems’ll still be operational then, but… Lister won’t have anybody.”</p><p>“He’ll have you,” Holly offered.</p><p>“Will he bollocks. I’m not gonna be here, ‘cos you’re gonna switch me off.”</p><p>“Why would I do that?”</p><p>“Because I’m not really a suitable companion for Lister, am I? I’m not up to the task of keeping him company. No, it should be someone he knows. Someone he worked with. Someone he spoke to often.”</p><p>Holly made a note of McIntyre’s request, and nodded. “When would you like to be switched off, George?”</p><p>“Whenever you’re ready. Not much point me hanging around here, is there?”</p><p>“You don’t fancy a game of chess before you go, do you?”</p><p>“I was never any good at chess.”</p><p>“Monopoly?” suggested Holly. “You can be the hat?”</p><p>“Holly. Please. Switch me off, and when he wakes up, give him some proper company, eh?”</p><p>Holly thought on this for a while, almost 0.78 seconds. He’d never killed anybody before - not intentionally, at least - and that’s essentially what McIntyre was doing - asking to be killed. However, McIntyre was right about one thing - the power being used to project him could be diverted to the stasis booth, and Space Corp regulations were firm on the preferred survival order between humans and holograms.</p><p>Holly smiled. “You’re an alright dude, McIntyre.”</p><p>“I’m just returning a favor,” said McIntyre, smiling back at the computer.</p><p>As McIntyre began to fade away, he thought about that Welcome Back reception, about the shudder of terror and anxiety that gripped his soul as he heard that coarse, idiotic Liverpool accent calling for him to give a speech. He thought about how nervous he was, how he was so scared that even as a hologram he’d essentially blacked out and couldn’t remember it.</p><p>Then his mind turned to the person he’d become in the days since - kind, confident, funny. The sort of person people wanted to be around.</p><p>He thought about the life he’d led since his death. However short, he’d still packed more life in during those 72 hours and change than he’d done at any point before the aneurism.</p><p>None of that could’ve happened without that speech.</p><p>A second life.</p><p>As the last remnants of McIntyre’s personality flickered away, he hoped he was giving Lister the same opportunity. Maybe it wasn’t likely, three million years into deep space. But he was hopeful.</p><p>He smiled.</p><p>Then he was gone.</p>
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